Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners does not go that route. It opens with a shot of a snowy forest, where a deer quietly noses around for food. Into the frame comes the barrel of a shotgun.
Just so, semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning are, pretty clearly, different sorts of theories. The term âtheory of meaningâ has, in the recent history of philosophy, been used to stand for both semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning.
In programming language theory, semantics is the field concerned with the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. Denotational semantics, whereby each phrase in the language is interpreted as a denotation, i.e. a conceptual meaning that can be thought of abstractly. 2  Such denotations are often mathematical objects inhabiting a mathematical space, but it is not a requirement that they should be so.